Scene: Western Bulldogs medical rooms. Bandages, crutches, braces, wheelchairs  – even a prosthetic leg – are strewn around the cluttered room. 

Glum-faced medical gurus, Dr Zimmerman and Dr Landsberger,  are in conversation with a pensive Luke Beveridge about the injury carnage.

On the whiteboard (make that two whiteboards) is a long list of those missing in action.

Bevo:  So what exactly is a compound dislocation of the finger?

Dr Zimmerman: That’s what happened to Tom Boyd on the weekend, Bevo. The bone actually protruded out of his finger.

Bevo (wincing): Not so good for a bloke who’s our number one ruck then?

Dr Z: Nah, he’ll be right to go.

(Tom Boyd’s name gets moved into the ‘available’ column).

Bevo: It didn’t look great when Bont did that weird action with his knee. What’s the story?

Dr L: A hyper-extension is the term, Bevo, but nah, he’ll be right to go.

(Bont’s name gets moved into the ‘available’ column).

Bevo: Ok, what about an update on Dale Morris?

Dr Z pauses, shuffles papers, glances nervously at Dr L., and takes a deep breath.  Well Bevo, as you know, in the past  Dale has suffered a broken leg, a fracture in his back, and at the start of the season,  a torn…

Bevo (testily): Yeah, we know all that. Ancient history. I’m asking about the CURRENT state of play.

Dr L: Let me handle this one, Zimma. Dale is 35 and his body’s taken a battering. Just this week he went in for surgery to clear out that knee. He had blood tests, and I have to be upfront about what we’ve just heard.  He’s – well, he’s just been diagnosed with the Ebola virus.

Silence, and then all break into relieved chuckles. Bevo slaps Dr L on the back. The way Zimma was carrying on, I thought he must have had a career-threatening ailment or something. You old fox, Zimma! Okay, good news at last... Dale is right to go!

(The name of Dale Morris is moved to the ‘available’ column).

​With the amount of footy I've watched over the years, I don’t always remember each individual player’s debut, even that of legends.

But I do vividly recall the first game played by Dale Morris. The year was 2005. Our new coach Rodney Eade pulled a surprise, selecting the mature age rookie for the tough role of shadowing Mark Ricciuto, then one of the most damaging players in the competition. Dale had never even played TAC Cup, had trained with us for four years just hoping for this opportunity. He ran out for the first time alongside captain Luke Darcy, and future captains Brad Johnson, Matthew Boyd, Ryan Griffen, and Bob Murphy. Legendary players Scott West, Rohan Smith and Chris Grant jogged with Dale down the race. He entered for the first time the brightly lit field of his dreams.

So superlative was the performance of this mystery debutant that the commentary team joked that he could be a smokey for the Brownlow, with Gerard Healy hamming it up further: "The  All-Australian committee has already convened an emergency meeting."

Last week, 13 years later, Dale was a guest on Foxtel's On the Mark program. It almost shaped as an obituary on a stellar career apart from the fact there was no way that Dale saw himself that way. As the discussion roved around the injuries and heartaches, I had a poignant sense of all that he had been through, and how much his body had endured on our behalf. His young son, he said, was completely turned off football after watching his dad spend 18 months recuperating from a broken leg. He didn't want to play footy because "footy hurts dad."

When Dale finally returned from the arduous rehabilitation and all the setbacks, it was to a side that was a dismal rabble, further off a premiership - it seemed -  than ever. The year was 2013.

And yet, Dale explained to the incredulous reporters, he never, ever, stopped visualising himself as a premiership player. What it would be like to run onto the ground. The roar of the crowd.  

To stand on the premiership dais, collecting his precious medallion from an Auskicker wearing number 38.

In 2016 Dale achieved his dream. We didn’t know that his back was literally broken for the entirety of the finals series; the only inkling I had was a moment in the late stages of the second quarter  when the momentum was with the Swans. As the ball got swept to the other end, I saw how slowly Dale got up from a contest. That was before he performed smothers, desperate lunges, the ultimate one-per-centers in a gruelling third quarter.

Before  Lance Franklin wheeled imperiously through the centre of the G, about to make one more counter-attack to wrest the game from our keeping in the dying minutes of the game. Dale ended up almost horizontal as he launched himself at the competition’s star player. It may have been the most epic moment, of the most epic of matches.

I feel that gnawing fear, even through my pride and admiration, as I listen to Dale talk about the possibility of playing in a second premiership. The fear we feel when our players get near the end; the desperate wish that they do not play too long, that our club will not have to make the toughest of calls. For when would a man like Dale Morris ever concede that his body has had enough?

Dale takes the field for the 243rd time on Saturday night. It's only his second game in an injury-plagued season. 

The nearest player in age to Dale is Jackson Trengove, a mere 27-years-old. Dale’s skipper for the evening is  22-year-old Marcus Bontempelli, who was aged 10 when Dale debuted. Yet even with the presence of our 35-year-old skewing the stats, we retain our dubious honour of presenting the youngest team to take the field as we have virtually each week.

It’s a frenetic, fast-paced match. Our Boys look switched, on, urgent, but they’ve shown this for a quarter here and there in all our heavy losses. Sustaining it, standing firm when the momentum shifts: this has been where our struggle has been.

Bevo has thrown all the cards up in the air. Defenders Naughton and Cordy are surprise figures in the forward line; even more surprisingly given the makeshift team, scoring doesn't seem quite as excruciatingly impossible as it has so often been this year.

North are a better team this year, and they are tenacious. One of their best, unfortunately for us, is Shaun Higgins. There is nothing so former as a former player, even though his departure at the time was amicable enough. Higgins thought that North were closer to premiership glory than the bedraggled, divided team that limped to the end of 2014. We on the other hand had grown frustrated about whether he would never get his injury-plagued body right, even though we knew the talent he possessed. Irrationally, it hurts that it's finally come together for him and we never got to benefit. More rationally, we're incensed to see he's adopted North's Fake Tough Guy Persona nurtured by Brad Scott (Foundation Member of the Tragician Hall of Infamy) as he executes cheap shots on our players if they're lying prone on the ground.

With him in brilliant form the Kangaroos begin winning more contests. Their forward line has a matchwinner that even the Bulldog Tragician struggles to hate, the guy who always reminds me of an over-eager puppy dog, Ben Brown. North gain a 10 point lead. Our Boys look weary; oh what we would give to have another of our injured players Jack Macrae, who always runs as hard in the last quarter as in the first, to be out there as North seem set to romp away with the match. But somehow, we find that elusive will to win. Somehow, an unlikely hero, Billy Gowers, runs into an open goal after a beautiful pass from Josh Schache. Somehow, our Bulldogs are ahead.

Such joy there is, at the thought of a win. Such a racket do we all make, rising to our feet. So loudly does the Bulldog chant go up, so hard do we stamp our feet on the concrete floors, urging our boys to hang on.

There are just two minutes to go. This was the scenario where we were at our best in 2016. Our structures, our decisions, our will, our desire, stood up, after all, in that fiery cauldron, the heart-stopping Preliminary Final. But too few of those warriors - just nine of the premiership team - are out there. A mistake is made, with only 40 seconds left. Ample time, it turns out, for the ball to be swept down the ground by North easily, so easily. It seems so cruel, it is so cruel. But the Dogs have lost.

We applaud them still, but Bevo is awaiting them with white hot fury and a scathing analysis of all the mistakes - ALL THE MISTAKES -  that cost us the game.

Two 18-year-olds, Ed Richards and Aaron Naughton, played for us on Saturday. Maybe they'll tell their kids one day, about playing alongside Dale Morris, a gentle man in all senses and a legend to us all, even though he has never, to my recollection, taken a specky. He's never made an electric dash down a wing, bouncing the ball (has Dale EVER bounced the ball?) He kicked the most recent of his three career goals way back in 2011; the odds are against him adding to that tally. Remarkably for one who plays in defence, he's never been cited by the Tribunal, let alone been suspended. Dale has never been in the news, thrown out the worse for wear from a nightclub or disrespecting a woman. He has never walked the Brownlow red carpet. He's not going to appear in a HQ shoot. He will not adopt a man bun.

I like to think - perhaps I hope - that he chats to Ed and Aaron about all the things he knows and all the values he's lived in his time with us. He might tell them, too, of the low points. That, eight years before he wrapped his arms around Buddy and ensured that we won a flag, he was part of a Bulldog defence that was humiliatingly torn apart in a final by that same Buddy Franklin. The power forward destroyed us almost single-handed in that match, kicking eight goals. Dale was the first of his hapless, under-sized, defeated opponents.

But that didn't destroy Dale's dream, even when he went through three preliminary final failures, even when he got pitted against other forwards he had no right to be playing on like Nick Riewoldt, even when he spent time in with a plaster cast up to his hip and in a wheelchair. That dream carried him through to the premiership dais in October 2016, when some lucky Auskicker wearing number 38 got to present a premiership medallion to the great man Dale Morris.

​On October 2, 2016, while waiting for OUR team, the 2016 Premiers, to step out and greet us from the Whitten Oval balcony, the Libba Sisters fulfilled a long-held pledge of what action we would take should The Unimaginable ever occur. Amid the thousands of amazed, hungover, elated revellers, we lay down on the muddy turf, smelled the earthy smells, and looked up at the sky.

I felt then that the Bulldog Tragician story was at an end. The premiership had brought to a close, forever, the heartache, the bitterness of the ‘what ifs.’ Our Boys had written the most spectacular, brilliant, and most improbable of stories. Was there, could there, be anything left to say?

The meaning of that story seemed something pure and lasting. Yet it has become hotly contested, as events in history so often are.  Reframed, far too quickly, in terms of what has come after: a mediocre 2017, and an increasingly disastrous 2018. The ‘we won it too soon’ explanation, of a team that ‘over-achieved’ in a flukey month of footy, has gained currency... even, perplexingly, from within our own club. (Too soon, when we last won in 1954? Surely we didn't have a secret mission statement in which we aspired to win a flag once every 65 years or so?)

Bob said this week that for other, regularly successful clubs, winning a premiership is like climbing Everest; a massive endeavour, from which you recover and then gather strength to launch again. For us, he says, it was more like landing on the moon.

Meanwhile Bevo (Our Saviour) sounds increasingly plaintive as he endures his weekly grilling on what went wrong. He implores everyone to move on, to realistically assess our performances and progress through a different lens from the constant harking back, the endless focus on how we did it in 2016 and why we can’t replicate it. He asks us all to live in ‘the now’.

Whether this is a message to the players, the fans, the media —or maybe a forlorn appeal to the universe — I couldn’t rightly say.

I didn’t see our performances against Collingwood and Melbourne. I was 1000 kilometres away on holiday; but I probably could have, as I would have in other years, found a way to tune in. I felt an apathy which was bigger than the certainty that we would lose these games; more disturbing than  just the fact that our performances, so earnestly, painfully dire, are difficult to watch. I’ve abundant experience in weathering both scenarios, after all.

No, the reason for my disturbing indifference is something else less familiar. An uncertainty about the meaning of our story in the 'now' of 2018.

It was for so long a story which revolved around our noble, fruitless quest for a premiership. Years when we were close to it and stuffed up. Years where we weren’t contenders at all - that was a story too.

Of course I always argued (sometimes with a note of desperation) that the story of supporting a club is about more than premierships. But even those alternative stories, from which I’ve drawn strength in bad times, lately fail to inspire.

The story of sharing the story of beloved veterans, of being present as their journeys unfold, of bearing witness to their struggle, their injuries, their heartaches and their joys?

Well, the quixotic character of Bob Murphy is now a media identity. Still beloved of course, but Bob, in his new guise, even picked us to lose to Port Adelaide by 15 points. Which was probably generous, but still…

‘Keith’ Boyd is now a ‘development’ coach at Collingwood, wearing the dreaded colours black and white. I imagine him with a meticulously well-organised clipboard, giving a fixed stare of disapproval to players with outlandish hairstyles, or those who wear beanies to training.

The travails of holding up our backline for 13 years have taken their toll on the body of our heroic Dale Morris. Liam Picken, the most courageous of men, has taken too many knocks to the head; the damaging effects of concussion have left his footy future uncertain. We now fear, rather than yearn, to see these warriors  in our colours again.

What about another romantic element of our story, of sons living out their fathers’ dreams? Libba, with his second knee reconstruction, has missed this year. The career of Mitch Wallis, hailed early as a future captain, is languishing. Bevo, with his quaint mangling of the language, explains that he wants Wally to add a ‘qualitative sheen’ to his current attributes. An unimpressed Wallis is linked (could there be anything worse?) to the Bombres.

Could we seek solace in embracing the story of young guns whose future, brimming with possibility and potential, might deliver us another flag? It seems a little indecent to turn our allegiances towards them, when the core of our premiership team is still in their early 20s. And even though we've been heartened by the little signs, the obvious raw talent in youngsters Tim English and Aaron Naughtin, they’ve disappeared too quickly down the never-ending injury tunnel for us to truly bond with them, build a new story around them. 

I guess the story that I don’t want to write is where our anticipated dynasty went, why and how our justifiable hopes of sustained, consistent success, becoming ‘just like Geelong’ or ‘just like Hawthorn’ dissipated so quickly. Why instead, as our growing circle of critics say, we reacted to the premiership by being 'just like us'. Why only 11 of our 2016 premiership team are out there on Thursday night, and the array of disillusioning reasons that the other 13 aren't able to be there with them. 

This season, I’ve realised, is at best one of those lulls, a stalling, an aimless spinning of wheels while we wait for a new story to emerge. I've seen many of them before. They are forgettable but necessary. It’s just that writing about it, when success was so recent, and the feat so grand, doesn’t have any appeal.

Still, the Libbas get together to watch the match against Port, from my sister’s apartment in Seddon  – our vantage point for some of the wonderful, surprising, joyful events of 2015 and 2016. And recently, some terrible defeats. We’re not wearing our scarves, lucky or otherwise. There’s no sense of anticipation, no anxious chat about our prospects, no discussion about selections. Alarmingly, the Libbas can not even muster anticipatory indignation about how horribly biased  the umpiring is likely to be before the parochial South Australian crowd.

Having missed the past two matches, I’m unprepared for just how dreadfully our injury-riddled team are going. The first quarter is stunningly bad.

Libba One: Who’s that blonde guy wearing long sleeves? He’ll never make it.

Libba Two: The one who just kicked it to Port again? I’m not sure.

Libba One: He’s got a porn-star moustache, just like Shane Biggs. But it can’t possibly be him. Can it?

Pained silence as the architect of the Great Wall of Biggs in the 2016 Grand Final, kicks the ball to a Port player. Again.

Libba Two: I know we were going to have a cup of tea at half time. We might as well have it now.

Libba One: I guess there’s not much point in waiting until we score a goal.

We’re not angry, even at the umpires. ( Okay, just a little. I mean, what was that free against Toby McLean in the first minute  all about? Honestly, if that were Bloody Joel Selwood…!)

Sometimes we chuckle at our team’s overall ineptitude. It's laughter with a hollow sound, as in rare forays into the forward line, players miss from 20 metres out.

But there is a sorrow there too. The premiership heroes are pale imitations, wearing the frustrated expressions of men who can’t remember how all the pieces used to fit. The second tier players, promoted more because of our injury toll than scintillating form, have failed to thrive. Our skills are awful. In the box, Bevo wears the careworn expression of the struggling coach.

It may only be quarter time, but we’re facing a belting. No one seems capable of turning the carnage around. Ryder, Dixon, one of those Jesus-lookalike-Westhoffs - we are being rag-dolled by a production line of big strong men with barista beards.

In the second quarter, someone at last steps forward, an unexpected hero: a first-year player, the youngest man on the ground.

‘Little Red’ Richards, who was busy even in the diabolical first quarter, kicks the first goal of his career. His team-mates flock to him; suddenly there’s a flicker of energy. He kicks another; the depressed Libbas sit up from our slumped positions and do a high five, while an excited text comes from our teenage niece who’s watching the game. ”Little Ed!”

Now the young man with the flame of red hair is hemmed in on the boundary, 50 metres out, a long way for a slightly built 18-year-old on a wet and heavy ground. He has the calm look, the self-assurance of the young player secure in his own talent. He’s not looking to pass it off; he’s not hesitant about grabbing his moment. We don’t expect, after the efforts of his team-mates, that he will even make the distance. And yet the ball sails through.

The Libbas clap; we beam, like proud aunties. “GO LITTLE RED!”

His team-mates flock to him again; there’s something irresistible about his smile. There are freckles on his nose, stars in his eyes. It’s as though Little Red alone remembers how much fun, how simple, this can be. You win the ball. You kick a goal. Then you try and do it again.

Easton Wood rips a hammy; you know straight away it’s something bad. The defining image of the night could be the forlorn sight of our captain huddled in our race, helplessly watching our depleted team fail again, knowing his season is over, the hours of rehab and frustration ahead. When Jackson Macrae joins him it's hard to believe the injury gods could continue to be so cruel.

But amid the gloom, somehow we keep waiting for Little Red to enter the frame, to waltz with his light steps across our TV screen. After his superb second quarter, he does it less often, but it’s always worth the wait. We rejoice in his balance, the extra time he always seems to have. His courage. His nimble steps. His quickness of mind.

At the final siren Ed Richards jogs off the soggy ground with his weary team-mates. He has played 11 games for just four wins. Many of those losses, like tonight, have been lopsided, painful affairs. But his efforts alone mean their heads are held a little higher.

Some time over the next few days, a little phrase keeps coming into my mind. I trace it back, way back, to a long-ago match, in an era when games were taped, not streamed, and my sons liked to re-watch the games (at least they said they did when I plonked them in front of the TV). There was some gushing commentary about the emergence of a possible superstar. The memory is too faint for me to remember if it was even one of our players. The hyperbole came from the likes of Peter Landy; maybe it was Sandy Roberts.

But their usually garrulous co-commentator was uncharacteristically understated before he said anything about the new bloke's future. ‘He’s gonna be a player,’ murmured Lou Richards, the great-uncle of our Little Red. I like the memory. I sit down, and begin to type.

​We were travelling  down the Western Highway to Ballarat for our blockbuster against the Gold Coast Suns when the bad news filtered through: Marcus Bontempelli was a late withdrawal from our already depleted team.

It was almost enough to cause traffic chaos. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see multiple cars with Bulldogs’ bumper stickers hastily executing U-turns, their long-suffering occupants fleeing back to the safety of the western suburbs.

With captain and vice-captain sidelined, teenagers holding together a brittle backline, and only eight of the 2016 premiership team taking the field, the youth of the Dogs’ team is almost shocking. Whether measured by games played or age, our profile is that of the franchise clubs in their first season or two, when there was widespread acceptance that they would be thumped by 10 goals every time they took the field.

Yet in the watery Ballarat light, those that bravely continued down the highway saw Our Boys somehow find a way to win.

The signs have been faint, but there are rumblings of momentum, little signs that our team, shell-shocked by that hideous injury list, was finding something of a mojo, learning to play together, gaining confidence after our horror start to the year. It has to be said, though, our ‘streak’ of two wins in a row against fellow bottom of the ladder stragglers weren’t exactly classics. But our team had shown heart. Often that’s enough.

We left encouraged, if not buoyant.

The Bont is back for our match against the Lions. He is the skipper in a team where only Matt Suckling is over 26. Within minutes of the match beginning, his class, grace and instinct for the game are on display. Operating in that different time zone of the truly gifted, Our Golden Boy snaps a goal. There haven’t been too many exhilarating moments in 2018. But this, at last, is one of them.

When those cars nearly veered off the highway last week, part of our angst – our unfairly directed angst – was not just that The Bont was out, but that his replacement was the much-maligned Mitch Honeychurch. In every season, in every team, in every year that I’ve followed the Dogs, there’s always been that one player (okay, in many years more than one) who’s a magnet for criticism.

The "suppository" — as that former prime minister would have said — of our frustrations.

The one whose mistakes loom large, whose errors we cannot forgive.

The Tragician is far from immune from these unworthy thoughts. Yet admitting this makes me uncomfortable and sometimes ashamed. After all (and for this we can all be truly thankful) it’s not me going out there putting my body on the line, risking injury in each brutal contest. I’m not the one who has a millisecond to decide what do; I’m not shouldering the burden of knowing that each of my actions out on the field may be the difference between the team’s success and failure.

Mitch Honeychurch has been around our club longer than you’d think; he was drafted in 2013. There was never any suspense about who would be the number one pick selected that year by The Acronyms, who of course had access to the cream of the land’s talent; they chose the prototype modern, powerfully built footballer, with the movie star looks, Thomas Boyd.

2013 was also the year that our recruiters made the momentous decision to select (thank you, thank you, THANK YOU) our number four pick, a rangy kid called Marcus Bontempelli.

Fifty nine names were called out – and the two Sydney-based teams had actually called out:  PASS rather than make a selection – before Mitchell Honeychurch, just 175 cm and 70 kilograms, was drafted, without fanfare, to the Western Bulldogs.

​The career paths of the three draftees have diverged widely. The Bont has now played 92 games; he was pivotal in our 2016 finals and premiership. He’s been the youngest ever AFL captain; he’s already snared two Charles Sutton medals. The number four Guernsey is the hottest property for sale in the Bulldogs shop. With his Italian good looks, I always picture him as a profile on a Roman coin. He’s humble, affable, sure of himself without cockiness, and somehow in all his interactions with the fans, I see something not always associated with AFL players. Kindness.

Tom Boyd’s career has taken a more circuitous, even melodramatic path. A sensational, contentious transfer to the Bulldogs. Sneering criticism of his pay-cheque, endless debate about his true value. Stints in the twos. A bizarre dustup with a team-mate. A fairytale ‘coming-of-age’ performance in a Grand Final, followed by a year of more struggle and mental health concerns.

This year Tom seems comfortable in his own formidable strength, throwing himself into the ruck contests while we all hold our breath, a man-mountain. No longer the cleancut youth of the draft photos, he now sports an interesting array of facial hair and resembles a swashbuckling pirate.

And Mitch Honeychurch? He’s had no luck with injury. His role in the team is precarious, his hold on his spot always a week-to-week proposition.

He’s mustered just 29 games in his five seasons; seven of them this year.

Last year he was out of contract. The Dogs offered him a one-year extension.

He is small, but not particularly quick; brave, but not noted for his skills. Even Bulldogs fans would struggle to recognise him if he strolled down Barkly Street, though he’s adopted the ubiquitous man-bun. Yet his name takes up disproportionate space within the fan forums. The commentary is rarely kind.

Kids don’t hero-worship our number 22. Nobody hopes and prays the ball will be in his hands at a critical moment in a final of the future.

We’ve seen many Honeychurch prototypes over the years. Some fulfil our gloomy predictions and never manage to scrounge more than 30 or 40 largely unappreciated games. There are others, though, whose initial careers were just as lacklustre. Blokes with unlikely body shapes, a dearth of flashy footballing talent, no scintillating highlight reels. Men like Tony Liberatore, whose physical stature meant he had no earthly right to play high level footy, but won a Brownlow. Like Daniel Cross, who had none of the gifts of the current wearer of the number four Guernsey except - and he had this in spades - courage, yet won a Sutton medal. Like Matthew Boyd, who willed himself from Frankston reserves to premiership player.

Mitch Honeychurch is probably no more  — and no less — talented  than these men. I’m sure if the Bulldog Tragician blog had been around in the early days of their careers, there would never have been excited predictions about future glory for Libba the First, Daniel Cross or ‘Keith’ Boyd. On the other hand it’s one of the crueller aspects of footy, that sheer talent does not alone foretell a future. Chris Grant, the ‘Rolls Royce’ never saw a flag while Clay Smith, more like a battered but somehow reliable Holden —a footballer of far humbler pedigree but outsized determination - who was desperately unlucky in so many ways but lucky enough that his brief window of footballing health came in the second half of 2016  — is a premiership player.

The Dogs defeated the Lions on Saturday night. Maybe for the first time this year, footy was fun again. Our team even kicked 100 points; our appalling inaccuracy was not quite so, well, appalling. There were errors, there were flat patches, but there were moments when Our Boys linked up, running like the wind to help each other out. Moments where you could see a future, a bright future at that.

The backline was held together by veteran player ‘In-Zaine’ Cordy, another of those unheralded players who’s never won a Rising Star nomination, but was a premiership player in only his eleventh match. I love that 'In-Zaine' always looks personally affronted when a  goal is scored in his vicinity, let alone against him. His moustache somehow bristles in an enjoyably mean way. You get the feeling he wouldn’t have been too sorry when his knee collided, completely accidentally, with Callan Ward’s head in that bruising preliminary final. Zaine, pick 62 in the 2014 national draft, has now played 39 games, and is just 21 years old.

Another old hand, 23-year-old Jackson Macrae, was indisputably best on the ground with an incredible 47 possessions. In Jackson there’s not only a hunger to succeed; there’s a hunger to get better. We had him pigeonholed as a master accumulator, reliably  racking up umpteen possessions per week. But now he takes contested marks in the forward line. He’s even a goal kicker, and actually features in highlight reels. Where, previously, his magic was unobtrusive, invisible, in the match against the Suns, he delighted us us all by careering down the wing, bouncing the ball, before landing an impeccable pass.

And his beautifully weighted kick to Tom Boyd had all the poetry of Marcus Bontempelli in full flight.

Mitch Honeychurch, meanwhile, played as a tagger on Saturday night. He kept the human scrabble rack, Dayne Zorko, in reasonable check, and accumulated the highest number of possessions of his brief career. Yet inevitably, as fans debate this week’s selections, Mitch’s name will - as always - be the first one viewed as dispensable.

Over in the camp of our mortal enemies the Bombres, selection debate will be even more frenzied, as they deal with the fallout of their humiliating loss to the Old Dark Navy Blues. (Cue some immature chortles from the Bulldog Tragician). The man in their sights will be one who had all the gifts, as much pure talent as any ever seen in the red, white and blue. While Jackson Macrae elevates his game to incredible new levels, his fellow 2012 draftee Jake Stringer’s career is, not for the first time, at a crossroads.

Meanwhile the statistics of our enthusiastic but rough-around-the-edges rookie Billy Gowers, who couldn't make the grade at lowly Carlton, are surpassing those of All-Australian and premiership player Jake Stringer.

My thoughts keep wandering back, though, to Mitch Honeychurch. I try to remember more about his debut in June 2014. The Bont already had a couple of games under his belt before his fellow draftee got the call-up. I realised, then, that the day the number 60 draft pick debuted was a match against Melbourne. Its highlight was the trans-formative moment when 18-year-old Marcus Bontempelli announced his greatness, manufacturing an unbelievable goal, hemmed in on all sides from the pocket.

The fans were in raptures; the Bulldog Tragician dedicated an entire blog to celebrating its glory, forecasting that The Bont would one day captain our club, win a Norm Smith and a Brownlow.

When The Bont kicked his freakish goal,  Mitch Honeychurch was one of those in the vicinity. He was 19 years old, just at the very start of his footballing journey. He had kicked a goal with his very first kick, but had a modest eight disposals for the match, and would play only two more games for the year. But as The Bont's kick sailed through, Mitch Honeychurch raised his arms, laughed at the sheer genius of what we’d witnessed, and ran forward to congratulate his team-mate and prodigy.

​I’m sure I’ve seen most if not all of the same games as Gary, and probably more games than him overall, though not consecutively. There’ve been babies, holidays, colds and flu to interrupt the rhythm, and I've rarely travelled interstate to see the Dogs. Which has usually been just as well. I don’t know what the ratio of wins to losses has been in the decades I’ve been watching; it’s unlikely to be a stat I’d like to dwell on.
But my experiences in those formative years of barracking have cast a shadow, and no more so than in what by now is an irrational reaction to those imposing Melbourne ‘Big four’ clubs: a fear of their supporters, a cringing memory of past humiliations, a distorted perception of our relative strengths over the past few years, one that is grounded in memories now decades old.

Carlton, of course, was always one of those clubs. They were the anti-Bulldogs, with their wealth, hubris, ruthless expectation of success, Liberal party connections, and dodgy but arrogant presidents. (They even had a Rhodes' scholar on their list, for heaven's sake. Not to mention the infamous Bluebirds). They flaunted their ability to go out and buy a premiership or two (ok, 16). That theme song boomed relentlessly in my head after each galling loss. Da-ta-da-ta-da.

Oh how we despised them. Those privileged, elitist, Old, Dark, Navy, Blues.

So whenever we encounter the Bourgeois Blues, as we sneeringly nicknamed them in my rebellious youth, I revert to a time-warp sensation, a fear of losing, a feverish conviction that THEY are the team I loathe the most (I know I said that about Essendon a mere fortnight ago but I’m sure you don’t read this blog to get facts and rationality).

I guess after standing too many times in those Princes Park terraces copping hidings, I’m frozen in some version of footballing PTSD. Footy was primitive then, primal, even ugly. There were no polite reminders flashing on the scoreboard reminding fans to behave nicely to each other, no separations of fans into bays so you could at least endure potential misery with like-minded sufferers. There was a tangible sense, as you were (well at least I was) wedged beneath the armpits of triumphant, celebrating Bluebaggers, of our footy club as despised outsiders, losers in every sense of the word, mockingly told we should just bugger back to St Albans or Footscray or Deer Park as soon as possible, and leave the rest of the competition to get on with their real business, doing something we knew nothing about.

Winning premierships.

With these memories and flashbacks, my sense of apprehension about the match was of levels that may have been understandable if Stephen Kernahan, Diesel Williams, Bruce Doull and that guy ‘BOSUSTOW!!!!!’ who flew for mark of the year each week were still taking the field. Then again, it’s bizarre how someone who writes a footy blog can take so little notice of whatever’s been happening over the years with opposition clubs and their playing personnel.  I was agitated when we played Essendon two weeks ago that Darren Bewick was getting too much of the ball -  until it was pointed out to me that the ginger-haired bloke racking up possessions was Devon Smith.

(While we’re on this subject, why do Essendon always have so many unlikeable red-heads? Paul Barnard, the aforesaid Darren Bewick, Moorcroft, Alan Ezard, Dustin AND Ken Fletcher…ok, I’m veering off track. But I believe it's an issue worth thinking about).

Back to my sentiments about our clash with the Bourgeois Blues  – my fear of failure against them was not allayed by reminding myself they’d lost the first five matches of 2018. In true Tragician fashion, I figured this would only make it worse, make us MORE of a laughing stock, if we couldn’t even beat the Bluebaggers when they’re down on their knees.

Carlton, of course, are allegedly young and rebuilding. (Again. Even though that borderline-crook president who called our club tragic, boomed out in his raspy voice that “Carrrrllllton NEVER rebuilds” !!). And yet, they’re not all that young, with Kane ("Grandpa") Simpson and Daisy Thomas still going around; it’s the Dogs that, as with every match so far in 2018, fielded the youngest and most inexperienced team.

Last week our Bulldogs were in frequently charted territory.

We were stranded at the bottom of the ladder, with the footy world lined up to jeer and sneer at our misfortunes. No longer everybody’s second favourite team, the Cinderella club was back sweeping up the chimney ashes.

There were rumours of disunity and in-fighting. Players were not kicking it to each other (here was me naively thinking  that was just our skill level).

And Bevo – Our Saviour – had lost the players! (Goodness. Where?)

I flinched at every dismal headline. I shuddered at every unsubstantiated theory, even when it came from wise and knowledgeable sages such as Brendan Fevola.

Because there’s always that kernel of doubt, isn’t there? that fear that as fans we’d always be the last to really know. Confident and complacent in the loyalty of our  2014 captain, Ryan Griffen, we were blindsided by news of his defection and the poisonous mess that lay below. Hoping that in 2018 the penny would drop for Jake the Lair that a higher work ethic could reap rewards, we were poleaxed when his name emerged as 2017 trade bait, dumbfounded that it could have come to this when our club became hell-bent on getting rid of him at any cost. Some of the reasons gradually emerged; others may never surface beyond the inner sanctum from which we the fans are forever excluded.

Turmoil, unrest, injury after injury: it wasn’t the ideal build-up to tackling our most loathed adversaries. (Well, of the Melbourne clubs at least). My dislike of the Insufferables in Red and Black is of course legendary; it had something to do with a hellish afternoon in the early ‘80s when the Bombres inflicted our worst ever defeat, by 146 points. And at the Western Oval, no less. (We bounced back strongly in our next contest with them, however, hauling back the margin to a mere 132 point loss).

And there’s the class warfare aspect; it was one thing to have the citizens of the leafy eastern suburbs look down upon us, but to be scorned by those smug fans of the club just the other side of the Maribyrnong has always been another thing altogether.

The fact that in recent times we have been a better performed team than them, and have in fact beaten them over the last four matches, only makes the prospect of them trouncing us at this low ebb even more unbearable.

That we would be trounced appeared inevitable. With players going down like nine pins, we were the only team in this round whose average age was under 24; the only team whose games average was under 75 (ours was just 59.5). It’s the profile more often seen in a team that claims to be ‘rebuilding’ (Carlton, for example, had an average games of 83; even Brisbane has 78). 

Our threadbare backline featured a pair of 18-year-olds. And our first – and second – ruck, Tim English, was playing just game number five; he might look like an eerie hybrid of Scott Wynd and Simon Beasley (let’s not think about that concept too much), but how on earth could the kid, raw and undoubtedly talented, compete, for virtually the whole afternoon, against the imposing bulk of Tom Bellchambers, listed at 108 kilograms (in other words, the combined weight of Dailey Bailey, Ed Richards and ‘Celeb’ Daniel?)

And if the anticipated thrashing unfolded, what about the horrific prospect of our former number nine, Jake Stringer, Frontrunner Extraordinaire, emerging from the shadows to dance on our grave, maybe even making rude gestures towards Bevo and the crowd OR – this possibility, which I could clearly visualise, enraged rather than alarmed me  – after scoring some impossibly magic goal, running past and arrogantly ruffling the hair of the poster boy for good living, Our Golden Boy, The Bont!!

Still, despite these colourful scenarios (I was quite possibly the only one to conjure them up) you don’t get to pick and choose your times to be there as a fan. And after all, it’s a running joke in our family, whenever the Dogs got off to an atrocious start to the season (admittedly we’ve had plenty of opportunities to polish such running jokes), that my mother would remind us that the Bulldogs had lost their first two matches in 1954, and still gone on to win the flag.

So I headed to the match. Messages from the Universe weren’t promising; I was unsure what to make of one omen; walking around that river which divides Footscray and Essendon on the morning of the match, I’d been stung by a bee.

I'd finally banished the so-called Lucky Scarf. It was 30 degrees, and it had clearly had lost its magic allure.

I’m not saying the binning of the not-so-lucky scarf was DEFINITELY the critical factor, but who can say? Because Our Boys had switched back on to those demented ‘Men of Mayhem’ levels. The blue collar work ethic returned. You only realised how much it had been missing when you saw it again. Those acres of space in which oppositions had romped were shut down; players in red and black could not move without the suffocating pressure of three, four, five Bulldogs’ players. Luke Dahlhaus, so subdued in the first two weeks was immense, Jack Macrae was everywhere  (but when was that ever a surprise?) and The Bont loped around like the elegantly talented thoroughbred we know him to be.

While Bont’s greatness was evident in his first few games, there are always players who surprise you; they’ve been pigeonholed early in their careers, and the hard work they'd put into quietly transforming their games often overlooked. Lachie Hunter had always featured in that category for me, etched into my mind as a lightweight half forward inclined to the flashy; I’ve been too slow to reappraise and value his efforts. Now as I watched him I realised how much my perception had shifted. Even in the debacle against West Coast, I’d seen him applauding and clapping Ed Richards who’d taken a risk in the backline which didn’t come off; it was Lachie left guarding the mark as yet another goal sailed over his head, but his encouragement of his young teammate caught my eye as one of the truer kinds of leadership.

Lachie Hunter is now a relentless runner both ways, one moment bobbing up to link in with our gallant young defence, seconds later presenting as a target in our forward line. In his linkman role, he took 13 marks on Sunday, the same as the combined efforts of Joe Daniher and Hale Cooker (or whatever that guy with the weird haircut calls himself). In fact seven of our players, including the diminutive ‘Celeb’ Daniel, took more marks than any single Essendon player (their highest being the perennially grouchy and aggrieved Brendon Goddard). It was a measure of just how hard Our Boys worked despite the sapping and fatiguing conditions.

The performance was full of heart if not always polish; we threatened, and threatened, to blow the game wide open and inflict a thrashing, and yet somehow the margin was never so wide that our opponents could not have easily dragged it back. Tragician nerves began to fray when the Bombres chipped away our margin in the last quarter (how did I survive a grand final?); when Joe Daniher dragged down a mark metres out, I feared  the worst, most galling kind of defeat: the one where you capitulate after leading all day. My head was in my hands; only the roar of our supporters informed me that not only had Big Joe made a horrendous mistake, giving out a sloppy handball in the goal-square, but that out of nowhere ‘Celeb’ had materialised to ensure no goal was scored.

The Dogs found something more, in the stifling heat when every step must seem like a kilometre. Toby McLean had the ball and was charging, bouncing the ball, closing with electrifying speed on the goal, selflessly shepherded by Mitch Wallis and then Josh Dunkley. The crowd made the most amazing noise as the ball speared through the goals, a roar as loud and joyful as any since October 2016.

The match, at last, was ours, and all the more treasured for its unexpectedness.

Amid the angst of the last two weeks some furious fans dredged out the old-fashioned lament that our players were no longer ‘playing for the jumper.’ It’s always been a strange concept to me and one I doubt resonates with the players of today. And yet who could say, seeing Jake Stringer in the unfamiliar red and black, that his very donning of the sash hasn’t transformed our view of him.

He’ll be celebrated, of course, in time: one of the oh-so-few Bulldogs premiership players. But on Sunday we looked at him anew. Maybe it was those red and black colours, but he was in every conceivable way no longer our Lair. The brashness has disappeared. So has the Jake Stringer swagger.

Instead I saw a pallid and unfit player, a one-trick pony who may never attain the greatness that was his for the taking, a player who for quite some time has been surpassed by less showy but harder-working players like Lachie Hunter and his fellow 2012 draftee Jackson Macrae. In the last quarter he wheeled around hemmed against the boundary line in the forward line, the same manoeuvre we thrilled to dozens of times in his five seasons with us. When his premiership captain Easton Wood used every bit of his strength to corral him, our joy was fierce. Jake toppled like a tree trunk. No, not ours any more.

And our Bulldogs are no longer on the bottom of the ladder; in fact, in the euphoria of the victory, I was keen to remind everyone that we’re only two games off top spot.

And, let’s not forget: in 1954 we lost our first two games and still won the flag!!

I wasn’t really interested anymore in the number 25 for Essendon; it was far more important to cheer our victorious heroes off the ground. We hadn’t won a match since August 5, 2017; we wanted to sing the song with extra gusto. Inside the change rooms, Ed Richards, Aaron Naughtin and Billy Gowers got to sing it for the first time… and then a second, because Bevo (still Our Saviour) got them all to link in with the coaches and injured players and support staff, all those who’d worked to make the magic reappear in the past miserable fortnight. They sang it proudly, one more time.